


all of this turbulence wasn’t forecasted

by bexgempisces



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie & Skye | Daisy Johnson Friendship, Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie Is a Good Bro, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt Skye | Daisy Johnson, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Self-Harm, Skye | Daisy Johnson Needs a Hug, Skye | Daisy Johnson-centric, This will hurt, depersonalisation, pls read the warnings, seriously i live for the mackdaisy brotp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28725573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bexgempisces/pseuds/bexgempisces
Summary: It’s wrong.It’s all wrong, but she can’t quite work out what it is. She stares harder into the mirror, the taste of acrid vomit still lingering in her mouth.The girl in the mirror doesn’t look right. Her features are all messed up, it looks like that Picasso portrait Daisy remembers seeing at the art museum when she ten.—Daisy has a depersonalisation episode.
Relationships: Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 26
Kudos: 79





	all of this turbulence wasn’t forecasted

**Author's Note:**

> this one is...i’m warning you, if you get triggered by stuff like this please don’t read it 
> 
> my brain literally said “we’re going sad and projecting tonight” lol so uh you get this i guess 
> 
> it’s set sometime after the trip to england in season 5 but before Option Two (i think, very rough timeline because season five felt like it lasted a week and three months all at the same time i didn’t understand it all 
> 
> WARNINGS: depersonalisation, derealisation, depression, graphic cutting and description of said cuts, post-torture 
> 
> like i said, pls just be careful 
> 
> also i know this isn’t the same for any one person, i’m only going off google and my own experiences with this type of stuff so i’m sorry if it’s wrong or anything 
> 
> -bex xx

It’s wrong. 

It’s all wrong, but she can’t quite work out what it is. She stares harder into the mirror, the taste of acrid vomit still lingering in her mouth. 

The girl in the mirror doesn’t look right. Her features are all messed up, it looks like that Picasso portrait Daisy remembers seeing at the art museum when she ten. Foster home number five, they were an okay family. 

But the girl in the mirror still look wrong, too big and yet too small all at the same time. It makes her feel nauseous again, the way the girl’s hands look massive and blurry as she tries to fix her face. 

No wait, it’s her hands in the mirror, the girl is Daisy. But why does it all look so wrong? 

_ Had to be done. I helped Inhumans. Don’t struggle. _

It plays round and round her head and she’s still staring at the abstract girl in the mirror like she’ll have the answers. Why is this time affecting her like this? She’s been tortured before, she didn’t react like this. The girl in the mirror offers no answers and it makes her angry because what the fuck is wrong? 

She punches the mirror as the world tilts, sending her tumbling to the floor of the bathroom, the fragments of the glass crashing with her. She vomits again, narrowly making it into the toilet, nothing but bile coming up now. 

Right, food was tasting wrong too. 

The world is still all wrong around her, she can still hear the whispers of Fitz as he slices into her neck, the cut burns even though that’s not possible. She sits back on her heels, feeling like a stranger in her own body. Like a virus has lodged itself in this foreign shell and it needs out, she needs out. 

She stays bent over the toilet until it doesn’t feel like she’s going to vomit anymore but the feeling of wrongness hasn’t quite disappeared yet. She can make out the objects in the bathroom, the things around her, but her body still feels inherently incorrect. 

She sits back, too big hands grazing something sharp. Oh right, the mirror. The one that was telling lies, the one that held the girl that was abstract, colours and shapes but no form. 

She knows she should feel the sharp pinpricks of picking up broken glass, she’s done it often enough in her life. But it isn’t there. There is nothing but an empty void in this foreign body, silence enveloping her and she almost can’t breathe. 

Her wrong looking hand brings up the glass to her face, reflecting her impossible facial features. She sees terrified, almost vacant eyes that look like hers staring back at her, her scar burning again. 

_ Had to be done. Won’t be the only one. You’re weak!  _

Red starts to flow from her hand, the shapeless object clumsily bringing the glass down. Why can’t she feel that? 

It is terrifying to be trapped in your own head, in a body you don’t recognise, with no way to bring yourself back down to earth. 

_ Had to be done. For the best. That’s a risk we’ll have to take.  _

The hand she doesn’t know begins to draw lines with the glass on the other arm. She can barely feel the pressure, mesmerised by the blood flowing from the cuts. This isn’t the first time she’s done this, she thinks vaguely, a little lightheaded from the vomiting and sudden blood loss. The hand, her hand? Not hers right now, carves neat lines in red, an entire row of careful cuts. 

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows this isn’t right. This is bad, very bad, big flashing red lights and alarm bells bad, but she isn’t completely in control right now. Fitz took that away when he tied her a table. 

The hand seems to run out of room on one side of her arm, so it flips to the other. 

_ “Never cut too near a vein, you could die.” A hazy memory of a fifteen year old girl in the orphanage teaching twelve year old Skye about self harm. Sharpener blades taken out with stolen screwdrivers and dragged across their thighs.  _

_Nowhere the nuns can see.” Skye recites, the rules that all the girls in this dorm have made, wincing as the bite of the blade hit it’s mark. It was practically a sadistic sharing circle in the orphanage, how much pain could you cause to make the inward outward? They smoked or drank or cut. Anything that made them feel something other than rejection. _

Clearly Daisy should have listened to Tara a little better, because that hand is dangerously close to a vein. 

_ “You cut across for the hospital. You cut down for a casket.” Tara told her, the blade flying across her leg as Skye played with her own across her wrists.  _

_ “That’s all it would take?” Skye asked, the smell of weed filling her nose as Julie lit up. Ugh, she hated that smell.  _

_ “We don’t do this because we want to die, Skye. We do it so we remember we’re alive. Tara said.  _

Right. Living. Something to be enjoyed. Something dying people crave. 

But what was the point? What was the point of saving the world and being the shield and staying alive just to do it all over again, if your best friend was going to cut you open and your pseudo-father was going to die and the world was going to end anyway because you were going to break it apart?

What was the point if people like Lincoln and Trip died and people like Daisy lived? Broken, worthless,  _ wrong _ Daisy, with the body that didn’t look right and a very bloody arm? 

“Daisy, come on, open the door.”

And just like that, the world slots back into place. There’s a knock at the door, the person outside has clearly been trying to get in for a while. 

Her hands are not shapeless blobs of flesh, they are her hands. They are her hands that have coded and punched and now...

Shit. That’s a lot of blood. 

The glass in her hand tilts up again and finally,  _finally_ ,  she recognises her face. No more whispers and no more wrongness and now all that’s left is shaking limbs and _blood, blood, blood._

“Daisy, for god’s sake, open the door!” It’s Mack at the door. How in the hell was she supposed to explain this when she doesn’t fully understand what happened in the first place? 

“Mack?” She calls weakly through the door. Her head throbs and her throat rejects the sudden use of her voice after all the vomiting. 

Note to self, don’t get an inhibitor ripped out your neck again. 

“What’s going on, Daisy?” Mack asks and quite honestly, she has no fucking clue. 

“I don’t- I don’t know. There’s- there’s blood-“ Clearly that’s enough description for Mack who just opens the door she apparently forgot to lock when she came in to clean up after getting Fitzsimmons and Elena back from England. 

How long has she even been in here? 

“Jesus christ, Zee, what have you done?” Mack gasps, Daisy looks down at her arm which finally looks like it belongs to her. She flinches at it. 

Clearly her aim had been a bit off, her hand not as steady as it thought. The cuts are deep and messy, it’s a wonder she hasn’t passed out yet. They coat the entire upside of her right arm. 

Wait, why did she use her left hand? She hasn’t used her left hand since the nuns rapped her knuckles every time she wrote with her left. Her subconscious has a lot of explaining to do. 

“What happened, Zee?” To his credit, Mack is being incredibly careful and calm about this, though she can see the fear in his eyes. 

“I think I had a depersonalisation episode.” Daisy admits, the words finally coming to her even as the tears build. “Been a while.” 

The last one she clearly remembers having was two months after Lincoln. Watchdogs had a bomb and she only managed to neutralise it before they blew up an entire apartment block. She spent the next five hours feeling like she was watching herself from above, or looking at herself through static. She’d quaked herself on top of a roof to ride it out when things started feeling off, staring at the stars and wishing she could join Lincoln amongst them. Her arms had ached but she kept quaking them and she didn’t even know why. 

_We do it to remember we’re alive_. 

Maybe that was why. 

“Can I stitch them up?” She nods and he grabs the first aid kit from under the sink, sitting in front of her on the bathroom floor. It looks a bit ridiculous, he’s so big and the bathroom is not, so he looks like a giant. 

“Thought you’d be with Yoyo.” Daisy breaks the silence that was settling between them as he cleaned her arm with antiseptic. It hurts a lot more now that it did when it happened. 

“We’re not exactly talking right now.” He admits quietly, she nods in understanding. 

“You’ll work it out.” She hoped they did, if anyone deserved to be happy, it was Mack and Elena. “Once all the bullshits over.” 

“It never does seem to be over though, does it?” He smiles at her and she’s pretty sure she returns it, but she’s only just getting control of her body back now so it could have been anything. “I’d like a long vacation after this.” 

“I would kill just to see the outside and not be fighting someone or getting arrested or whatever.” Daisy says wistfully, he nods in agreement, prepping the needle and thread to sew her skin back together. 

“Well you’re the Director, I’m sure you get to schedule days off.” 

“Didn’t think the Director got days off.” She jokes, but it rung true. None of them seemed to get days off. 

“Maybe you should change that.” He says. 

“I don’t even want to be Director. I can’t be the Director.” She admits, a little helplessly. She’s literally getting sewn up by her partner in the bathroom, she’s not exactly the best choice. 

“You’ve been doing okay so far.” 

“I’ve been in charge for exactly 120 hours, and in that time I’ve lost Coulson, got drugged, tied up and cut into, had a fight with pretty much everyone about my decisions, got Deke shot whilst trying to get Coulson and then the fucking Invincible Trio happened. Literally anyone would be a better choice.” She says bitterly. 

“You got dealt shitty cards and everyone is just...dealing, right now. I know it sucks major ass but we need you, Zee.” He says gently, finishing the last of her stitches and beginning to bandage her wounds. “And hey, you’re the youngest Director in history, so you’re doing something right.” 

“Ah yes, let’s trust the lowkey suicidal twenty-something with the agency, that’ll end well.” Daisy said dryly. 

“Glad to see you’re so hopeful about the future.” Mack chuckles, she swats him. 

“I’m depressed leave me alone.” 

“That didn’t work with Bobbi or Hunter or Hartley, why do you think it will now?” He laughs, finishing the last bandage. 

“You love me more?” She gets a snort for that one, so it’s obviously true. “Knew I was your favourite.” 

“Of course you’re my favourite, kid.” Mack says. “Movie night?” 

“Isn’t the world literally ending as we speak?” 

“Well, we know this place is apocalypse proof. You literally haven’t stopped since Coulson out you in charge, you need an off-night before you go insane.” Mack reasons and she relents. She’ll be up in the little hours anyway, nightmare have been keeping her up for ages now. She’ll get whatever needs to be done finished then. 

“Where did we get up to in Lost?” She asks and he grins widely. 

“Season 4, I’ll get the popcorn.” She laughs a little at how excited he looks. Maybe they did need this after all. 

“Great. And uh, thanks.” She gestures tok her bandaged arm and he nods. 

“Come to me next time it gets that bad? I’m sick of bandaging up your arms when they get all fucked up, Tremors.” He says and she hugs him before they stand up. Mack’s hugs are the best, the way he wraps people up and it feels like you’re being swallowed by him but in the good way. This is the first time since they got here that she feels safe. This first time in a very long time she has felt like she’s come home. 

“I love you, big guy.” She says into his chest because she is very short and he is very tall. 

“Love you too, kid.” He kissed her forehead and leaves the bathroom. 

She cleans up the broken mirror and stares at her reflection before dumping the glass in the trash can. Same dark eyes and same nose and same mouth. The body that belongs to her, the only thing she’s in control of these days. She dumps the glass and drums a finger against her bandages as she walks out the door. 

She knows it will probably happen again, maybe it will be easier or maybe it will be worse. But the one thing she knows, and has known for a long time and kept just refusing to admit was that she wasn’t alone. 

Maybe it would be enough. 


End file.
